Saturday, April 23, 2011

So there's this (pretty old) feature request to show notification when keyboard layout is switched (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66641). It's not too hard to implement that (although the KStatusNotifierItem is a bit limited in how the notifications can be set). But there's couple of questions I have and although it has 45 votes nobody replied in the bug so far so I'll post them here:

1) when keyboard switcher is in "by application" or "by window" mode and active window changes also switching current layout, would you want to see
notification as well? Or shall the notification be shown only for "manual" layout change? I would think you don't want that popup show every time you
switch the window, but then if you don't see the tray you would not know if layout changed...
of course we can add new UI option but there's quite a bit of them already so I would rather not unless I have to

2) would you care to set the notification timeout? or shall it just use some "system default" one? again the less new UI options the better, unless it's
really needed

Sunday, April 17, 2011

1. Global shortcuts per layout - seems like it's been a wanted feature for a while. This feature has been in master for some time so I am hoping to get some feedback (before 4.7 is released) as global shortcuts is not the most straightforward thing in KDE.

2. Remembering/restoring layouts for session. It was a bit more code than I wanted it to be (due to remembering layouts per application especially if spare layouts are on) but this bug (52095) has been there since 2002 (and couple of others have been duped to it) so those who were that patient definitely deserve it :)
Note: restoring layouts works for all switching modes except "By window". I am not sure if there's an easy way to restore layouts by window: currently keyboard daemon remembers layouts by WId which is transient. Theoretically we could try to store layout information into window properties
and let kcmserver restore them and then keyboard daemon will have to read that but that would be quite different from what it does now so that might take another 8 years to implement :)